New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has delivered the rent freeze he promised voters last year. The measure approved last week will cover more than 2 million tenants across the city — and the movement is spreading beyond the Big Apple. Activists in Massachusetts, California and elsewhere are pushing for rent control while getting stiff pushback from landlord groups.
‘Grassroots support’
A “national rent-control movement is rising up,” said Patrick Range McDonald at The Progressive. Mamdani’s movement “succeeded in raising nationwide awareness” of the issue amid an affordable housing crisis that has revealed the need to help millions of Americans who “pay unfair, excessive rents month after month.” Others disagree. Advocates who want to rein in rents should ask “how to build more housing, not how to ration the housing” that already exists, Jonah Karafiol and Jeffrey Miron said at The Boston Globe.
A proposed November referendum to allow rent control in Massachusetts gained a “swell of grassroots support,” said New England News Collaborative. One poll found two-thirds of voters backed the idea. But the measure will not come to fruition for now: The Massachusetts Supreme Court struck down the initiative over religious liberty issues. Advocates say their campaign will continue. The movement has the “momentum of hundreds of thousands of everyday people on our side,” Carolyn Chou of Homes for All Massachusetts said to the outlet.
Rent control advocates in Redwood City, California, are pushing for a November rent control referendum, said The Daily Journal in San Mateo. A similar measure failed to get enough petition signatures in 2024, but the “need is greater than ever,” said Clara Jaeckel, an organizer with the effort. A similar effort down the coast in Santa Barbara would limit annual rent increases to 3% or less, said KEYT. That cap “doesn’t allow the landlords to get a fair rate of return,” Betty Jeppesen of the Santa Barbara Rental Property Association said to the outlet.
Are such measures effective? A report on the 2021 “rent stabilization policy” in St. Paul, Minnesota, found the measure led to a “sharp drop in large apartment construction permits,” said MPR News. Rents have nonetheless dropped 10% since 2020 despite the “shrinking supply of housing.” Rents are also dropping in Las Vegas, which has no rent control ordinance. That is the “result of companies building more apartments,” said the Las Vegas Review-Journal editorial board. They build in hopes of profit fed by future rent increases. The city’s experience “shows why rent control isn’t needed.”
‘Hiding economic reality’
Rent control is a “provably dumb policy” consistently opposed by economists, said Jonah Goldberg at the Los Angeles Times. Prices “reveal where supply and demand are” while controls are “lies” in the service of “hiding economic reality.”
“Politicians and real estate moguls” should take note of a rising rent-control movement, Sara Pequeño said at USA Today. New York is a “special case,” but it also “shows the rest of the country what is possible when renters combine their power.”
Rent control movements surge in Massachusetts, California